DOE Announces Stimulus Funding for new SBIRs

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The Department of Energy gets it. On several levels. Stimulus means creating opportunities for creating jobs. Clean Energy is currently a cool technology to support. R&D without commercialization is just, well, academic.

So, the DOE is putting a nice chunk of their ARRA Stimulus money ($8.5 million) into new Phase I SBIR and STTR projects that place an emphasis on near-term, clean energy technology commercialization. Sixty six-month Phase I projects will be funded in amounts up to $150,000.

The Funding Opportunity Number is DE-PS02-09ER09-27. (CFDA 81.049)

Here's the complete topic list (For details: technical topic descriptions)

Topic 1: Advanced Building Air Conditioning and Refrigeration, Thermal Load Shifting, and Cool Roofs
a. Air Conditioning and Refrigeration in Buildings
b. Thermal Load Shifting
c. Advanced Materials for Roofing that Provides High IR Reflectivity, and is Architecturally Acceptable, Including Cool Roofs

Topic 2: Water Usage in Electric Power Production and Industrial Processes
a. Water Desalination for Use in Power Plants, Industrial Processes, etc.
b. Water Cleanup, Recycle and Reuse from Use in Power Plants, Industrial Processes, etc., Before Discharge
c. Desalination Using Concentrating Solar Power (CSP)

Topic 3: Power Plant Cooling
a. Advanced Dry or Hybrid Wet/dry Cooling Systems
b. Advanced Heat Exchangers for Super-critical Water Cycle Based Power Plants
c. Advanced Heat Exchangers for High Temperature, High Pressure Applications

Topic 4: Advanced Gas Turbines and Materials
a. Advanced Turbine Technology for IGCC Power Plants
b. High Performance Materials for Nuclear Application
c. Advanced Industrial Materials
d. Novel Modular Designs for High-efficiency Low-cost Distributed Power Applications

Topic 5: Sensors, Controls, and Wireless Networks
a. Sensors and Wireless Networks for Buildings Applications
b. Sensors and Wireless Networks for Industry Applications
c. Sensors and Wireless Networks for Nuclear Power Applications
d. Integrated Power Line Sensor Systems for the Smart Grid

Topic 6: Advanced Water Power Technology Development
a. Pumped Storage Hydropower (PSH)
b. Advanced Hydropower Systems
c. Wave and Current Energy Technologies
d. Advanced Component Designs for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Systems (OTEC)

Topic 7: Smart Controllers for Smart Grid Applications
a. Smart Controller for Household
b. Smart Controllers for PEV
c. Smart Controller to Enable the Dispatch of Distributed Energy Generators

Topic 8: Advanced Solar Technologies
a. Hybrid Solar Energy Systems: Combination of Photovoltaic, Solar Heat, and/or Solar Cooling
b. Innovative Applications of Solar Energy for Fuels
c. Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Systems for Distributed Applications
d. Organic Photovoltaic and Nanotech/Photonics

Topic 9: Advanced Industrial Technologies Development
a. Novel Approaches that Significantly Reduce Energy Consumption and Emissions in Cement Pyroprocessing
b. Scale-Up of Nano-Material Production
c. Novel Technologies that Utilize Waste Heat from Industrial Processes
d. Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction

Topic 10: Advanced Manufacturing Processes
a. Mitigation of Heat Losses, Fouling, and Scaling in Manufacturing Unit Operations
b. Advanced Distillation and Non-Distillation Processes
c. Advanced Dewatering

You can see the complete solicitation on the DOE SBIR website (http://www.science.doe.gov/sbir/) or on Grants.gov.

These projects can be styled as SBIR or STTR projects. Applications are due by September 4th.

You have to use Grants.gov (oh goodie!) to submit the proposal so better get started NOW to get the CCR and Grants.gov registrations done in time.

Thanks for this opportunity, DOE! Now, how about the rest of you Agencies?
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NIH Doesn't Budge on Excluding SBIR from Stimulus Money

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They really have no shame. The NIH, I mean.

Senators Landrieu and Snowe finally got a response to the letter they sent them. Want to read it? It's a masterpiece of bureaucratic doublespeak. Click HERE to retrieve it. It took them over three weeks to write this?

The key words are: "In addition to" in the sentence: "In addition to applying for funding through the SBIR/STTR program, small businesses are also eligible to apply for NIH funding through grant opportunities supported by ARRA...".

Never mind these ARRA opportunities are open to big businesses, universities, and every other organization under the sun.

And those "Challenge Grants"! Oy! Mark my words... they'll see 20,000+ applications for those 200 grants. Maybe a token 2.5% will go to small business - 5 awards! And I predict Grants.gov will implode on April 27th under the submission onslaught. It took one of my clients nearly 24 hours to upload their NIH proposal this week! If they're having this sort of problem now...

They even promise small business will have "appropriate representation ... on [challenge grant] scientific review groups". Hmmm, appropriate, eh? Let's see.... 2.5% of a 20-member committee is half a person. Wonder if they'll round up or down?

If you didn't know better, you'd think they really cared about small business. I'll say it again: they really have no shame.

The sad fact is the NIH is technically correct in taking this position on not increasing "its FY2009 appropriated" funding base. Their FY2009 SBIR/STTR Allocation Base is determined as percentages of their total FY2008 extramural R&D expenditures, and the ARRA funding doesn't affect that.

Basically, it's letter vs. spirit of the law. Stimulus is needed now and we're ready to do the work.

None of the other agencies saw fit to deliberately cut small business out of their extra money.

Who's going to tell the NIH to behave responsibly? The exclusion they snuck in has been signed into law, behind the backs of the Small Business Committees and without informing the President what he was signing.

Congress could repeal the exclusion, but do they have the fortitude to pass a bill that does that? Probably not.

Does President Obama have the authority to issue an Executive Order eliminating the exclusion? Probably not, but then I didn't think he had the authority to fire the head of a major corporation either.

We'll see what the NIH does in FY2010, when their TOTAL extramural R&D expenditures will include ARRA funding, and, as the Senate letter pointed out, the ARRA exclusion doesn't change the total!

Well, Senators Landrieu and Snowe - whatcha gonna do with this? Take them to task, or let them get away with sneaking around you? And Senators Feingold and Cardin - did you get a similar response to your letter?

We're counting on you, the congressional Committees who officially represent Small Business, to right this wrong. Please don't let us down.

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UPDATE: Sunday, April 5, 2009. I faxed a copy of this column to all members of the House and Senate Small Business Committees today. Any of you who feel so inclined should also raise some dust over this. Data files of contact information in three formats are on http://www.sbirreauthorization.com/. The more voices raised, the more likely they are to do something. And, at the very least, their awareness of SBIR and its importance to the high-tech small business community will be enhanced.
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"Getcha SBIR Stimulus Contracts While They're Hot!"

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Now that the Senate has told the NIH, in no uncertain terms, to provide our nations' small businesses the full measure of SBIR R&D funding to which they are entitled under the law, we can turn to some other Stimulus opportunities for SBIR companies. Hold on to your hats, what I'm about to reveal may startle you....

If you peruse the ARRA Stimulus Bill you'll find something for just about every Federal agency. Every one of them of them has been given a pile of money to spend quickly. One of the problems these agencies are having is getting the stimulus contracts issued fast enough. Remember the whole idea behind this Stimulus deal is a quick infusion of capital into the economy.

Procurement law under Section Six (Competition Requirements) of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (The FAR) requires that, except for special circumstances, all Federal government contracts must be issued only after a "fair and open competition." That takes time and lots of effort on the part of the government procurement officers to create and issue RFPs and collect and evaluate bids before the contract can be issued. They'd love to have a way to bypass the competition requirement and just issue contracts. Well, guess what, we have a special circumstances solution for them!

We who are members of the Small Business Technology Council (SBTC), an arm of the National Small Business Association (NSBA), participated in a national conference call this morning. Our leader and SBIR advocacy mentor, SBTC's Executive Director, Jere Glover, laid out the following very simple strategy: leverage your SBIR awards into Phase III contracts with Federal agencies needing to spend stimulus funds quickly.

Here's how it works... It turns out that once you have a Phase I SBIR award for developing a technology, all subsequent government contracts (or grants) for work that "derives from, extends, or logically concludes" that work are SOLE SOURCE JUSTIFIED. This means that if you can find something that ANY one of the Federal agencies is looking to have done, and you have had an SBIR (or STTR) award that you can show has such a relationship to that desired work, you can call up that agency, find the procurement officer who's responsible for issuing stimulus contracts (here's a website that makes your search easier: http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/agencies), and let him/her know that you have a "sole source justification" for the work. The contract can be immediately issued to you, styled as a Phase III SBIR, without the need for a competition. Truly.

And, believe it or not, whether or not you've gotten a Phase II is completely immaterial to this discussion. Of course, you do need to have something of value to offer the government in this deal, and there needs to be a match with agency needs and company capabilities.

I'm not saying that this will be easy. You'll have to play detective. It may be a challenge to find the "wires" to connect for getting to the funds. If you have an internal agency champion they may have to help you in navigating that agency's process. They'll probably have to use the Recovery.gov site themselves. But, the fact is that procurement officers in every agency have the responsibility to spend a LOT of money in a relatively very short time. Do whatever it takes to find them. They're motivated to make things happen.

We've already heard about one such contract issued -- The Department of Transportation issued a Phase III contract to a small business that had a DOD Phase I for some work that applied the same technology. Yes, it doesn't matter who issued the Phase I to you -- ANY other Agency can issue you a Phase III -- even ones who don't do SBIRs at all!

Get the idea? Yes, this is HUGE! GINORMOUS, as my granddaughter would say!

If you're not sure what a Phase III SBIR award is, download a copy of my SBIR Coach's Newsletter of Novermber 2008 that answers the question: "What is Phase III?"

Then download a copy of the ARRA Stimulus Bill from http://readthestimulus.org. Search it for anything that one of the Federal Agencies needs that may relate to what your company has done with its SBIRs. Make some calls. Do some negotiating. Sign some deals. Get some money.

We do expect to see a Continuing Resolution introduced and passed before the March 20th SBIR expiration deadline, but it will likely be short term -- maybe 60 days. So we'll have some hoop jumping to do to get an acceptable SBIR re-authorization bill crafted, passed and signed, but we will git er done!

Jere has promised to put some additional information on all of this on the SBTC website: http://SBTC.org. They put the really good stuff in the "Members Center" section, so please join the SBTC and help support our advocacy.

This ARRA deal is a short term opportunity. Make the best of it. "Getcha SBIR Stimulus Contracts While They're Hot!" (Opening day is just a couple of weeks away and I'm getting in the mood. Maybe this will be the Rangers' year! Someone please pass the mustard!)
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Key Senators join the call for NIH to "IGNORE" SBIR Stimulus Exclusion

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We got some action! Perseverance pays off!

The Senate's Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee's Chairwoman, Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Ranking Member, Olympia Snowe (R-ME) joined my call for the NIH to effectively IGNORE the ARRA Stimulus Bill's SBIR Exclusion in a letter sent today to Charles Johnson, the Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the parent organization of the NIH.

The PR Newswire story about the letter can be viewed by clicking HERE.

The headline is:

Landrieu, Snowe Emphasize Importance
of Small Business Innovation
to Economic Recovery

The subtitle is:

Call on HHS to fund SBIR/STTR despite
exemptions in economic recovery plan.

Quoting from the letter:

"While the $8.2 billion allocated through Title VIII of the Recovery Act is relieved from specifically funding SBIR and STTR projects, the Act does not exempt the HHS from its continued statutory obligation of allocating a minimum of 2.5 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively, of its total extramural budget for research and development for SBIR and STTR projects. At stake is as much as $229 million."

"The SBIR and STTR programs allow small research and development firms -- our nation's innovation lifeline -- to create high-quality jobs and cutting-edge products and therefore are fundamental to our country's economic recovery. Consequently, it is of great concern to us that the NIH maximize the benefits of the Recovery funding and provide not less than the statutory percentages of the Department's extramural research and development funding to the SBIR and STTR programs."

All I can say is THANK YOU Senators Landrieu and Snowe, and the rest of the Senate SBE Committee. I know for a fact that, due to the letters that many of us wrote, some of you also had a hand in this.

The HHS has until March 24th to respond to the Senate Committee in writing. Frankly, I don't think they need two weeks to decide to do the right thing. I sugest that we keep the pressure on the NIH to respond quickly and favorably.

Of course, March 24th is after the March 20th expiration date, so we MUST get that Continuing Resolution to make this really be other than a hollow promise.

UPDATE, March 11, 2009: Check out Rick Shindell's SBIR Insider Newsletter of this date. It provides some more information on activities concerning the Continuing Resolution, and some additional background on the NIH deal, including an actual copy of the Senate SBE letter.
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SBIR Exclusion From NIH Stimulus was even more underhanded than we thought!

[THIS STORY HAS EVOLVED SINCE THIS POSTING. SENATE TELLS NIH TO FULLY FUND SBIR DESPITE THE EXCLUSION.....READ THE POST OF MARCH 10th FOR THE STORY!]

The campaign is working folks! Everyone is incredulous that such a counter-productive restriction would have been made in these politically charged times, effectively excluding ARRA Stimulus money from small business, the ONLY sector of the economy that's currently creating jobs! And they're angry that it was intentionally done in such a manner as to escape scrutiny.

But you haven't heard anything yet. My original posting on this only scratched the surface of the underhandedness. It was even worse than we thought. I suggest that you take your blood pressure meds before reading any further.....

I gleaned a very disturbing fact today: The version of the ARRA Stimulus Bill that was engrossed (that's the term for being voted on and passed to the next step in the process) by the House, and the version that was amended and engrossed by the Senate, DID NOT CONTAIN THE NIH SBIR EXCLUSION CLAUSE! That means that when your Representative and Senators voted on this bill, SBIR and STTR were, as they should have been, a part of the NIH's Stimulus funding to the tune of some hundreds of millions of dollars in new projects for worthy small businesses.

The engrossed Bills differed in some minor elements, including the amount of money that the NIH was to receive, so they were sent to a Conference Committee (five Members each from the House and the Senate) to have the differences resolved. The Committee did its business and produced the final copy of the now enrolled Bill for the President's signature. Guess what!

THAT FINAL COPY, AND ONLY THAT FINAL COPY, DOES CONTAIN THE NIH SBIR EXCLUSION CLAUSE, and the President signed it into law, thereby taking away, without a vote, the money for those SBIR and STTR projects that effectively had been authorized by your legislators.

Check it out for yourself. All of the versions of the Bill can be found at: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-1. Look at each version. (To find the pertinent section, search for "HIV". It turns out that that term only appears in the same paragraph as the one that contains (or doesn't yet contain) the SBIR exclusion clause.)

When I was alerted to this, I was momentarily speehless. (Those of you who know me know how unusual that is!) I couldn't believe that anyone would have the guts to try such skulduggery and that the rulebook would allow this. So I did some research. They did; I'm not sure if it does; but that's indeed where and when they did it!

What about the Rulebook? According to the official government document "How Our Laws Are Made", Conferees are limited in their authority to make substantive changes: "Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses." Does this exclusion clause qualify as being germane or within scope? I'll leave it up to the legal eagles among you to weigh in on that. But what's done is done. The question now is how to best undo it, or at least undo the effects of it.

The legal eagles can advise us on what would need to happen to get this exclusion lifted, either by an action of the Congress with some sort of Bill, or by the President himself with an Executive Order. I just don't know what our next step should be in a procedural sense (someone please help me on this), only that we shall not sit by and let this stand unchallenged.

Of course, the NIH can choose to unilaterally undo this injustice and do the right thing by simply deciding to add an equivalent amount to what would have been newly authorized funds to their regular Allocation Base for SBIR and STTR, dust off those projects that scored well in recent evaluations but just missed the pay-line due to lack of funds, call up the companies, and issue the grants! VOILÀ! Instant stimulus. Shovel-ready job creation, as they say. What about it NIH, y'all up to doing the right thing? Legally you can do it. So please just do it!

OK, the list of suspects in our whodunit has suddenly gotten much shorter. Call in CSI. The ONLY people who could have introduced that clause into the bill were in that Conference Committee room. Who were the Conferees? Here's a source of that information: http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2009/02/stimulus-bill-conference-committee.html. [Hmmm.... Seems that Senator Specter wasn't on that Conference Committee, so our previous information may have been incorrect, and, if it turns out that we were wrong, and he had nothing to do with this, we hereby apologize to the Senator for that.]

All right, will the real culprit please fess up? Unlikely. Probably not even CSI can solve this crime. These sneaky-snakes tend to cover their tracks too well and close ranks when challenged. But someone in that Committee room did this, probably at the request of some misguided individual high up in HHS/NIH who thought they were doing something in the best interests of their Agency. At least I certainly hope it wasn't done maliciously. Frankly, at this point, I don't care who did it, just that the effects of it be undone.

I've been receiving lots of emails from people who want to know what they can do to help. Hits on this Blog and on my website's SBIR Reauthorization section are up more than tenfold from before this story broke. At least a dozen other Blogs and News sites have picked up the story and spread the word. It's almost viral!

So, let's keep up the pressure. Send out links to this Blog posting, including to other media. Send letters. Make phone calls. Armed with these new revelations we might get some attention from the right people, either in the White House, in the Congress or at the NIH, and turn this around.

And, one final word. That Continuing Resolution must still be secured. SBIR expiration is only two weeks away without it. The House Small Business Committee is the one that will introduce it, so focus on them. We hear rumors of a CR bill being prepared there, but nothing official has surfaced yet. I know it's a lot to ask, but please keep that pressure on too.

We shall persevere.

UPDATE - Sunday, March 8, 2009, 2:00 PM CDT:

An email letter addressed to the "Small Business Research Community" was sent out today by Jo Anne Goodnight, NIH's SBIR/STTR Program Coordinator, wherein the opportunity for small businesses to apply for grants in a new ARRA funded opportunity called "NIH Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research" was touted with the statement in bold face: Small businesses are eligible to apply for grants under this program.

Yes, Jo Anne, eligible, but competing with who else? You have to drill into the announcements a ways to see the list. Here's a shortcut. Among others, the eligible organizations include Public and Private Institutes of Higher Education, For-Profit Organizations (Other than Small Businesses), Not-for-profits of all types, and City, County, and State Governments. Hardly a level playing field! Good try NIH, but no cigar.

If you didn't get the NIH's email letter and would like a copy, write to me and I'll forward it.
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Hidden in the Fine Print - SBIR Explicitly Excluded from NIH Stimulus Money

[THIS STORY HAS EVOLVED SINCE THIS POSTING. SENATE TELLS NIH TO FULLY FUND SBIR DESPITE THE EXCLUSION.....READ THE POST OF MARCH 10th FOR THE STORY!]

SBIR's long time friend and advocate Ann Eskesen has alerted us to the fact that hidden (YES HIDDEN) in the new "Stimulus" bill is the provision that the money being provided to the NIH for additional R&D ($7.4 Billion) must NOT be used for SBIR or STTR projects. Huh? What were they thinking? As Ann said in her alert, "Such an exclusion is underhanded and entirely inappropriate." There's the understatement of the year (so far)!

Entirely inappropriate for sure. Does it make sense for the NIH to not seek additional innovative solutions from our small businesses -- a sector hailed by President Obama himself as being the most likely one to create the jobs that we so desperately need? 2.5% +0.3% of $7.4B is $207.2M that's been inappropriately withheld from our small businesses. That could be used to create a whole bunch of jobs!

And underhanded to boot! They snuck the wording into the fine print in "code" so we wouldn't spot it. A search for "SBIR" or "STTR" won't turn anything up. Here's the relevant section from page 62 of the Stimulus Bill - H.R. 1 (rub your eyes, it's hard to read):

National Institutes of Health / national center for research resources ...... For an additional amount for `Office of the Director', $8,200,000,000: Provided, That $7,400,000,000 shall be transferred to the Institutes and Centers of the National Institutes of Health (`NIH') and to the Common Fund established under section 402A(c)(1) of the Public Health Service Act in proportion to the appropriations otherwise made to such Institutes, Centers, and Common Fund for fiscal year 2009: Provided further, That these funds shall be used to support additional scientific research and shall be merged with and be available for the same purposes as the appropriation or fund to which transferred: Provided further, That this transfer authority is in addition to any other transfer authority available to the NIH: Provided further, That none of these funds may be transferred to `National Institutes of Health--Buildings and Facilities', the Center for Scientific Review, the Center for Information Technology, the Clinical Center, or the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria: Provided further, That the funds provided in this Act to the NIH shall not be subject to the provisions of 15 U.S.C. 638(f)(1) and 15 U.S.C. 638(n)(1): Provided further, That $400,000,000 may be used to carry out section 215 of division G of Public Law 110-161....

Spot the coded reference to SBIR and STTR? No? Not even with the "clue" I gave you? Well, you probably didn't know that 15 U.S.C. 638(f)(1) and 15 U.S.C. 638(n)(1) are those parts of the law which address the funding of SBIR and STTR. Yes, the "code" was citing the US Code of Law references without annotation. I agree, Ann, that was underhanded.

Getting steamed? Want to know who put this language in the bill? Ann says that it evidently was included at the initiative of Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA). Why? We don't know. We'd love to find out why he would have allowed such an overtly hostile act against small businesses to have been perpetrated out of his office. If you're in a position to query Senator Specter's office, please do so, and let me know what you find out.

Nothing short of a special bill repealing that exclusion provision can be done about this now -- the bill is law. Maybe we should mount a campaign to promote that. {Senator Kerry - you voted for the Stimulus bill - did you know that provision was in it? If not, please sponsor a bill repealing it!} All you folks from Massachusetts - put some pressure on!

As Ann says, "[This] Sets a strong and dangerous precedent. Once in place, such a provision sets the precedent for every other agency to adopt a similar approach at best to limit, at worst to destroy, the SBIR program." The SBIR Coach joins Ann, and others who advocate on behalf of SBIR, to do everything we can to prevent this from happening.

So, please send everyone you know who's an SBIR supporter a link to this Blog posting (http://sbircoach.blogspot.com/2009/02/hidden-in-fine-print-sbir-explicitly.html) so that they'll be informed of this outrage. Encourage them to be vigilant, and please please please, don't be silent!

UPDATE - Sunday, February 22, 2009: I sent out a FLASH Newsletter to my 250+ subscribers today with some additional information on this. See a copy of it (and other back issues) on my SBIR Coach's Newsletter webpage.

UPDATE - Tuesday, February 24, 2009: My friend Rick Shindell issued an SBIR Insider letter last night that provides some more clues for solving our SBIR Stimulus Exclusion whodunit. You may not like the light it sheds. He also provides some good information to help you support our getting that Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep SBIR alive. Please read it!

UPDATE - Thursday, February 26, 2009: I have crafted a letter requesting repeal of the NIH Stimulus exclusion provision that I will be sending to all of the members of the Small Business Committees in the Senate and the House, as well as to the Leadership of both houses of Congress, my Representative and Senators, and other selected influential legislators. I have posted it on my website in template form. Click HERE to see it. Copy and paste it into your word processor, tailor it as you wish, print it on your letterhead and let 'er fly! Remember, faxing it to the attention of the legislator's "Policy Advisor for Small Business Issues" is the most effective way to get their attention. We can do this.
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